VP Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistani Nuke
Proliferation
In '89 So US Could Sell Country Fighter Jets by Jason Leopoldwww.dissidentvoice.org
March 8, 2004

When
news of Pakistan’s clandestine program involving its top nuclear scientist
selling rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, blueprints for building
an atomic bomb was uncovered last month, the world’s leaders waited, with
baited breath, to see what type of punishment President Bush would bestow
upon Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharaf.

Bush
has, after all, spent his entire term in office talking tough about
countries and dictators that conceal weapons of mass destruction and even
tougher on individuals who supply rogue nations and terrorists with the
means to build WMDs. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf
fit that description.

Remember, Bush accused Iraq of harboring a cache of WMDs, which was the
primary reason the United States launched a preemptive strike there a year
ago, and also claimed that Iraq may have given its WMDs to al-Qaeda
terrorists and/or Syria, weapons that, Bush said, could be used to attack
the U.S.

Bush,
Vice President Dick Cheney and top members of the administration reacted
with shock when they found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s top
nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nations nuclear
technology and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon
finding out about Khan’s proliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan
off with a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act. In fact, it was
actually a cover-up designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the
proliferation for more than a decade and did nothing to stop it.

Like
the terrorist attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration had mountains of
evidence on Pakistan’s sales of nuclear technology and equipment to nations
vilified by the U.S.—nations that are considered much more of a threat than
Iraq—but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen.

In
1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the
black-market; Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the
Pentagon prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then working as
Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush administration: Pakistan
built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the
U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.

But
Barlow’s findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in the magazine
Mother Jones, were “politically inconvenient.”

“A
finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a
congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the
CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It
also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to
Islamabad,” Mother Jones reported.

Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was let off the hook last month so the
U.S. could use its borders to hunt for al-Qaeda leader and 9-11 mastermind
Osama bin Laden.

Cheney
dismissed Barlow’s report because he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the
F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by
Cheney to downplay Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities when he testified on the
threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and
was fired.

“Three
years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the
country had developed the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987,”
Mother Jones reported. “In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb.”

During
the time that Barlow prepared his report on Pakistan, Bryan Siebert an
Energy Department analyst, was looking into Saddam Hussein's nuclear program
in Iraq. Siebert concluded that "Iraq has a major effort under way to
produce nuclear weapons," and said that the National Security Council should
investigate his findings. But the Bush administration--which had been
supporting Iraq as a counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran--ignored
the report, the magazine reported.

"This
was not a failure of intelligence," Barlow told Mother Jones. "The
intelligence was in the system."

Cheney
went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry. In a
New Yorker article published on March 29, 1993, investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow as saying that some high-ranking members inside
the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal
so as not to sacrifice the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad,
which was secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear
capabilities and threat had become so grave by the spring of 1990 that then CIA
deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse
than the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1960s.

“It
was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I’ve been
in the U.S. government,” Kerr said in an interview with Hersh. “It may be as
close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than
the Cuban missile crisis.”

Presently, Kerr is leading the CIA’s review of prewar intelligence into the
Iraqi threat cited by Bush.

Still,
in l989 Cheney and others in the Pentagon and the CIA continued to hide the
reality of Pakistan’s nuclear threat from members of Congress. Hersh
explained in his lengthy New Yorker article that reasons behind the cover-up
“revolves around the fact… that the Reagan Administration had dramatically
aided Pakistan in its pursuit of the bomb.”

“President Reagan and his
national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in
the American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving the
Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important than nagging
Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan Administration did more
than forgo nagging, however; it looked the other way throughout the
mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistan assembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid
of many millions of dollars’ worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought
inside the United States. Such purchases have always been illegal, but
Congress made breaking the law more costly in 1985, when it passed the
Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the amendment was proposed
by former Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat of New York), providing
for the cutoff of all military and economic aid to purportedly non-nuclear
nations that illegally export or attempt to export nuclear-related materials
from the United States.”

“The
government’s ability to keep the Pakistani nuclear-arms purchases in America
secret is the more remarkable because (since 1989) the State Department, the
Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Department (under Cheney) have
been struggling with an internal account of illegal Pakistani procurement
activities, given by a former C.I.A. intelligence officer named Richard M.
Barlow,” Hersh reported. “Barlow… was dismayed to learn, at first hand, that
State Department and agency officials were engaged in what he concluded was
a pattern of lying to and misleading Congress about Pakistan’s
nuclear-purchasing activities.”

Hersh
interviewed scores of intelligence and administration officials for his
March 1993 New Yorker story and many of those individuals confirmed Barlow’s
claims that Pakistani nuclear purchases were deliberately withheld from
Congress by Cheney and other officials, for fear of provoking a cutoff in
military and economic aid that would adversely affect the prosecution of the
war in Afghanistan.

It
seems that today, Cheney is advising President Bush to deal with Pakistan’s
nuclear proliferation much in the same way he did more than a decade ago.
Give the country a pass, lie to the public about the seriousness of the
matter and tell Pakistan you'll turn the other cheek if the country agrees
to allow U.S. troops to use its borders to hunt for Bin Laden before the
November election.

Jason Leopold
spent two years covering California's electricity crisis and the Enron
bankruptcy as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is writing a book
about California's electricity crisis. (C) 2004 Jason Leopold.